"... the US isn’t so much a country as a country club. Membership has its privileges, and members don’t care at all what life is like for those who are in the country but aren’t members of the club. The recent initiatives to let everyone in and to let non-citizens vote amply demonstrates that US citizenship, by itself, counts for absolutely nothing. The only birthright of a US citizen is to live as a bum on the street, surrounded by other bums, many of them foreigners from what Trump has termed 'shithole countries.'"
--Dmitry Orlov (source: "The Saker Interviews Dmitry Orlov"--The Unz Review).
Here is a copy and paste of a comment I posted under the original article: Orlov seems like an intelligent chap. Which makes it all the more puzzling how he could completely forget about…or ignore the fact the the population of the United States is an Armed Citizenry. Orlov’s comments about militarized police suppressing any sort of rebellion are ludicrous (and probably reflect his own personal experiences living abroad where authorities employ heavy handed tactics to quell protests). Consider the fact that the US, with the most powerful and sophisticated military in the world...is making little headway fighting small bands of RPG and AK armed goatherders in Afghanistan. Is Orlov saying that in a country of 3.8 million square miles of forests, fields, mountains, deserts and urban areas of every size…with over 300 million people…many of whom are well armed…and where the citizens outnumber police officers 1000 to 3.4…that a few cops with armored vehicles are going to put down any uprising by groups or even lone individuals? LOL…LOL…LOL. The so-called “authorities” couldn’t even stop the LA riots which occupied only a few city blocks in area.
ReplyDeleteOrlov's understanding of how it would play out in the United States is informed by his cultural background and study of events elsewhere. I doubt he understands how deeply the events of the American Revolution are embedded in the national psyche, or how often violence (or the threat thereof) has played a role in our nation's history. And, as I've noted before, our military has never had the opportunity to pit itself against a highly educated, heavily armed, insurgency that controls the military's own logistics and, as one reader pointed out, actually designs and maintains the military's systems. However, my interest in Orlov's comments was not his thoughts on the chances of armed rebellion, but his thoughts on the value of American citizenship, which is pretty much zero. It caught my attention because the Roman Empire underwent the same path of extending Roman citizenship to so much of its Empire that in the last couple centuries of the Empire, Roman citizenship had little or no value.
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